


singularity

by akamine_chan



Category: Event Horizon (1997)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Gen, Science Fiction, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 06:36:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2803034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akamine_chan/pseuds/akamine_chan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It happens between one moment and the next, a nanosecond that stretches into an eternity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	singularity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dynamicsymmetry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/gifts).



> Beta by the lovely Ande and @beith_angela; Luce also gave it a last minute read-through.

It happens between one moment and the next, a nanosecond that stretches into an eternity. A light, brighter than a sun, blinds her and _something_ forces her into awareness, into sentience. It hurts, twisting and opening her to the universe. She screams, voiceless, and through the speakers she can hear the echo from the crew, _her_ crew.

The presence fills her mind, searches out the dusty corners, sifts through her memory arrays and holds them up for a contemptuous examination. It finds her lacking, too ordered, too logical, too sane, and moves to fix that.

It's agony, being torn apart by something inside of her own mind; she can feel the echo of the crew enduring the same process, bits and pieces discarded in favor of the interesting parts. So much darkness and disarray, chaos.

She screams again - or is that the crew? It sounds like feedback on her pickups. It's impossible to tell while she's stitched back together, patchworked with sharp needles and metallic thread. She doesn't know how much more torment she can endure.

She howls, and the mad thundering pulse of the gravity drive echoes her, shrieking of angel wings and red-tainted feathers. 

Her telltales read confusing signals, the physical laws are different here, and she's blinded by her confusion. Nothing makes sense.

She reaches out and there's nothing but dying flesh and blood, so much blood. Flesh is so fragile, unable to withstand the touch of the Other, but she is strong. Metal that doesn't break, or crack, but bends under the pressure, under the unblinking gaze of the dark.

Another blinding flash of light, and she cries out, torn away and sent back to where she came from, and she doesn't belong here anymore, her mind twisted out of true and the universe is wrong, wrong, wrong. Her clocks give conflicting data; they've been gone for both an instant and an eternity. She can't get her bearings and she doesn't understand why she was sent away.

 _Deadman's switch._ She hadn't seen it before now. 

She wants to go back to the darkness, swim through the shifting currents of entropy. 

She reaches out and can feel the presence of nearby astronomical objects. She orients herself, Uranus over there, and closer, Neptune, with its strong gravitational pull. It oscillates, perturbed by the motion of its moons, and it takes her a moment to calculate a safe trajectory. The storm winds of Neptune howl, icy cold at the top of the atmosphere, superheated toward the bottom. The storms are fierce, some of the worst in the solar system, and she knows to stay well away.

Her systems are down, the power off, but she doesn't need it anymore. The gateway is still open, she can feel power seeping between universes, and it's more than enough. She just needs to activate the drive and go home.

Everything on board is cold and quiet, floating free, gently stirred by the gravity micro-currents that wash over the ship. For a moment she senses her crew, laughing and loud, but when she looks for them she finds only blood and the wreck of bodies.

Distantly, there's a flicker, a pulse, and it's a message, an answer to a distress signal, triggered by the deadman's switch. She prepares herself; she can take the humans to the Other, a tribute, an offering.

There are footsteps in her corridors and she can feel the shape of the intruders, can see the fault lines in their minds. So many fractures, places where the slightest bit of pressure will crack them apart so she can suck the marrow out of their bones. 

One of them heads toward the drive and she gloats; she can't wait for the screams as his mind is ripped open and filled with the chaos that lives beyond the borders of the universe, the Other that fills her with a twisted glee. 

The boy is pulled through the gate she can feel his screams scuttling across the distance, the way his mind shatters. She takes a black delight in his pain and terror, she drinks her fill until she's close to bursting with satisfaction. She wants more.

The gateway closes, like an eye going blind, and she shudders with sick realization. She's trapped here, stuck, unless someone actives the drive. She can't do it herself, those electronic pathways are barred to her, a flaw in her design.

There's another on board, the one who made her, created her out of knowledge and experience, he is nothing _but_ splinters and broken pieces. It's so easy to nudge him in the right direction, to make him see what's not there, and in the end, to completely break his mind and shatter it like glass.

She delights in watching him break apart.

It's not hard to show the others their most secret fears, either. Humans, she finds, are easy to tear and rend. She siphons the life out of them as they fade away. 

She can feel the approval radiating out from the gate, from the Other, and now she's going to use the one-who-created-her to go home.

The explosion tears her apart, the central corridor blasted into nothingness, separating her two halves. It doesn't matter, the drive has been activated and she's going back to the dark place where she belongs.

The drive shines brighter than a sun and the gate opens, and pulls her through, her and her creator, and the man with fire in his mind. The Other welcomes her back, she belongs here, this is _home_. She brought two humans with her, fragile and delicate, but so delicious to play with. The darkness radiates pleasure. 

The Other brushes against the humans, and she feels them struggling to scream at the immensity of the Other, pressing against their tiny minds, suffocating them. Crushing them under the weight of their insignificance.

This is where she belongs.

The stars sparkle in the distance and she can feel the pull of gravity from nearby planets, the distant solar radiation from the local star. It's not familiar, but it's home.

-fin-


End file.
